Finding Useful John Dewey Resources
on the World Wide Web

By Craig A. Cunningham, Ph.D.

Center for School Improvement, University of Chicago,

Author of Curriculum Webs: A Practical Guide to Weaving the Web into Teaching and Learning (Allyn and Bacon 2003),

and Web-Builder, John Dewey Society

This is the first of three articles to appear during the next few months in Insights that provide an overview of the kinds of web-based resources you can find that are related to the life and work of John Dewey. This article is also available online (with live links), at http://craigcunningham.com/dewey.

So you're interested in finding out more about John Dewey-his ideas, his life, criticisms of his ideas, criticisms of his life? So you think the World Wide Web might be a good place to start?  If so, then you are most likely to start by going to your favorite search engine (I like google.com) and typing JOHN DEWEY into the search field.  The result is likely to be..

.an awful lot of hits, say 347,000! That's a lot of potential resources.  But too much information is almost as bad as too little information. Where do you begin?

You can improve things somewhat by making sure to search for the phrase John Dewey, so you get only web pages containing the words "John" and "Dewey" in that order.  On google.com, you do this by clicking on the Advanced Search link and typing JOHN DEWEY into the field next to "Find results with the exact phrase." Now you've only got 83,200 hits. If you spend 10 seconds looking at each page, that will only take you about.

.231 hours.  You think, "there has got to be a better way."

And you're right. You have several options.  

Most flexibly, you can craft a more specific search.  In the old days (about five years ago!) this required understanding of Boolean logic and the use of arcane symbols and forms. However, recent advances in search engines have made advanced searches a lot easier. Depending on the search engine you use, you can specify other words to be found on the page, words that should NOT appear on the page, what language the page is written in, limit your search to just the .*edu or *.com domain or a specific machine name (e.g. www.cia.gov), or  only those pages updated within the last six months. 

Crafting a specific search is now simply a matter of filling out an online form. For example, let's say you are interested in finding out the birth date of Dewey's first wife, Alice.  You could use google.com's advanced search, filling in "alice" in the field "Find results with all of the words," and "john dewey" in "Find results with the exact phrase," and "birthday birthdate birth" in the field "Find results with at least one of these words" and limit your search to pages written in English and hosted within the *.edu domain, and you will return 172 hits, the first of which, "Chronology of John Dewey's Life and Work" contains the entry: "1858.09.07 Harriet (Hattie) Alice Chipman Dewey born to Gordon Orlen Chipman and Lucy Woodruff Riggs Chipman, Fenton, MI." That gives us what we want, very quickly.

Without a doubt, if you are looking for something very specific, knowing how to craft a precise advanced search is a most useful skill. However, you don't have to use advanced searching to find specific information, especially if you have easy access to a small number of rich and well-maintained web sites related to the general topic of "John Dewey" or to more specific sub-topics.

This leads to the second alternative to sifting through tens of thousands of web pages in search of specific information:  knowing the web address (or "URL") of a small number of useful sites or-even better-creating bookmarks (or "favorites") linking to those sites so you don't have to remember anything except where you put the bookmarks.

If you use the Web as often as I do, you have already created a hierarchically-arranged set of bookmarks related to every topic related to your professional and personal interests. (You've also taken the time to delete most of the pre-set bookmarks or favorites that came with your browser.) My bookmark file contains hundreds of entries under such topics as Professional Development, Teacher Quality, Standards, Religion, Software, and Canoeing. Every time I find a useful site (one that might be useful later), I set a bookmark.  (If you do this, you also need to learn how to organize the bookmarks into folders.  A long random list of links without any organizational scheme becomes almost as unwieldy as the Web itself. You can learn more about bookmarks or favorites by looking at the online "Help" that comes with your web browser.)

If you are interested in finding out more about John Dewey, you should probably have a folder in your bookmarks file called "John Dewey," and that folder should include a small, growing list of especially useful web sites.  You can grow the list yourself by adding bookmarks to useful pages as you come across them during your searches or as you are given URLs through email or conferences.  Or, you can let me do some of the work for you, and copy that part of my bookmark file related to John Dewey.  At the end of this series of three articles, I will show you how to do that.

But first, it might be helpful for me to describe some of the most useful web sites devoted to John Dewey, in order to give you a "lay of the land" and help to shape your expectations for what you'll find on the Web and where. To start, let's look at some sites that aim to provide comprehensive coverage of Dewey and also include multiple links to other sites dealing with more specific topics.

By far, the most significant and useful web site devoted to Dewey is the web site of the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University, at http://www.siu.edu/~deweyctr/. The Center is especially significant because it controls the copyright to most of Dewey's works, and also houses and is publishing Dewey's correspondence. If you are looking to do serious original research into Dewey's life or ideas, a real-world visit to the Center will probably be in your future.  If you have less intensive needs, a virtual visit to the web site might be all you need.

The Center's web site has had a significant redesign just this past summer, and it deserves to be at the top of any list of relevant Dewey resources.  Besides information about the Center and its programs, the site includes a "Short Annotated Reading List" that can be the starting point for any inquiry into Dewey's ideas, links to "Occasional Papers" relating Dewey's work to other thinkers, a Dewey chronology (referred to above), a complete listing of the contents of Dewey's Collected Works, and a small list of important external links.  Unfortunately, what you won't find is selections from Dewey's extensive writings, as those writings remain, for the most part, under copyright restriction. Nor will you find a substantial body of secondary work related to Dewey.  For these you'll need to look elsewhere.

Perhaps the most extensive online collection of Dewey's writings and secondary material related to Dewey and the other American pragmatists is the Pragmatism Cybrary (http://www.pragmatism.org/), hosted at Oklahoma State University. There is an extensive bibliographical essay on the history of pragmatism worldwide. The essay contains numerous links to pages offering details on important people-among them, naturally, is John Dewey. (But don't ignore the many other resources related to pragmatism, which I won't describe here.)

The Pragmatism Cybrary's Dewey page (http://www.pragmatism.org/genealogy/dewey/dewey.htm) offers a short but useful overview of Dewey's life and work, a list of recent editions of Dewey's writings, a chronological list of Dewey's major works (a few with links to online versions), a list of important secondary writings about Dewey's work (some linked to online versions), and a short list of websites related to Dewey.  The Cybrary also contains an online versions of Dewey's "My Pedagogic Creed," and links to e-texts of The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays, Democracy and Education, and Reconstruction in Philosophy, housed on other web servers.

Another important online resource related to John Dewey was actually once part of a website called George's Page, hosted at Brock University in Canada and related to the work of George Herbert Mead. But Dewey has emerged from George's shadow, and now has his own site, called A Certain Logic (http://spartan.ac.brocku.ca/~lward/dewey/). The main attraction of this site is access to some of Dewey's own writings.  You'll find e-texts of School and Society, How We Think (1910), Essays in Experimental Logic, and a host of Dewey's articles published prior to 1903 and now in the public domain. There is also a useful timeline of Dewey's life, and a partial list of Dewey's writings. It is also helpful to visit the site of the larger Mead Project (http://spartan.ac.brocku.ca/~lward/), with its extensive collection of materials related to Mead, James, James Baldwin, Charles Cooley, William Isaac Thomas, Edward Sapir, and others.

The final resource I will discuss this month is the John Dewey section of the Philosophy Pages (http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/dewe.htm), written and maintained by Garth Kemerling. The pages include an overview of Dewey's ideas, with links to further information on key concepts such as idealism, fallibilism, and pragmatism.  Additional pages place Dewey within the larger context of western philosophy, and provide links to important secondary material related to Dewey. You'll also find a very helpful dictionary of philosophical terms, as well as advice for students in philosophy classes.

What I've discussed so far, of course, just begins to scratch the surface of useful resources.  Next month, I'll talk about some important resources that may be relatively harder to find that the highly visible sites discussed here. Finally, two months from now, I will discuss the huge number of sites containing trenchant criticism of Dewey's ideas-many without a firm foundation in understanding of those ideas, but quite interesting nonetheless for those of us interested in Dewey's influence.